Memoir Nation

This week we’re taking a bit of a departure from all things memoir to celebrate independent media with Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman, who bought “The Rumpus” in 2025. We’re supporting their relaunch in this interview, and talking about the indie media landscape, some of their new initiatives, when they knew they were buying the magazine, and also the all-important role their dog Max plays in the n...

So much of what’s funny stems from what’s terrible and tragic, and the funniest people are also often the darkest ones. This week we explore that truth with comedian Rosebud Baker, who talks with Grant Faulkner about her alcoholism, what happens to women when they become moms, and also her anger—and how she turns that into humor. This is a permission-giving show, as so many Memoir Nation episodes...

This week’s show is a nuanced exploration of the various and creative ways memoir can be an exploration of identity, culture, and history, and how in unearthing our own stories, we can discover so much about the world around us. Guest Beronda Montgomery has written a thoughtful and “thinking” memoir that has us ruminating on trees, legacy, ancestors, and who gets and is denied credit in our societ...

This week’s episode will be a fast favorite because guest Ronit Plank is speaking the language of a memoir advocate. We get right to the heart of so many things that make memoir special and important. Ronit speaks about coming to memoir kicking and screaming, and how it opened her up, and how memoir makes us all more empathetic. A true memoir advocate, with her own popular memoir podcast, Let’s Ta...

Form, form, form. We can’t stop circling it on Memoir Nation because everyone has a different approach to it. Mostly we’re taught that once you know your form, you can pour your content into it. And yet, we keep hearing from authors whose process is the exact opposite—which is that form follows content. Today we talk with Eleni Sikelianos about the ways in which she followed her subject matter to...

If you’re a regular listener of Memoir Nation, you know we love to cover memoir in all its changing and emerging forms. The micro memoir is a form all its own—different from the fragmented style that’s been so popular of late. In this week’s show, we’re going micro, exploring how writers can boil the essence of what needs to be said into the fewest number of words. We’ll talk about the form, its b...

This week on Memoir Nation we take a specific guest with a specific skillset/talent and look at ways to apply what he does to our broader writing community. Guest Brandon Deyette shares with us how he channels story by being hyper-attuned to his emotions, and Brooke and Grant speculate that this kind of attention is an emotional practice that any memoirist can cultivate. When you write memoir, you...

It’s our 400th episode and we’re celebrating with celebrated food critic and author Ruth Reichl! Ruth wrote her first food memoir before food memoir was a thing, and she takes us back there to when bookstores didn’t know what to do with her work. Ruth is a pioneer of the food movement in America, and is known for her mission to demystify the world of fine cuisine. This is a generous interview, ful...

We’re late to celebrate Grant’s new book, something out there in the distance, so we’re doing it this week, bringing on his co-collaborator on the project, Gail Butensky. Grant and Gail partnered up to create a beautiful and unusual project. This week’s show mixes things up a bit because Brooke interviews Grant, and Grant interviews Gail, and Grant shows up for his segments in all kinds of locatio...

Lots of writers want to write about sex and all the ways it shows up in their lives—and yet, it’s incredibly challenging to do. It’s exposing and uncomfortable. It means sharing the most intimate moments of our own lives, but also the lives of others. It can involve sharing mistakes, shame, and also some of the worst things that have ever happened to us when it comes to the negative side of the se...

This week is a treat because at the heart of many memoirs are stories of people throwing themselves into meaningful distractions in order to not have to face the challenges and unravellings so common to adult life. In her new book, Why Fly, Caroline Paul becomes obsessed with learning to fly a gyrocopter as her long-term marriage is dissolving. In the show we speak about risk, about love and loss,...

This week we’re talking about form with yet another memoirist who defied conventions to create something unique and beautiful. Guest Danielle Bainbridge’s new book of personal essays, Dandelion , covers many topics—mental health, race, body, feminism, and so much more. Myriam Gurba calls her work “kaleidoscopic” and we ruminate on what that means in the context of form. This is a conversation on f...

How do you get into a story that centers events you don’t remember because you weren’t alive to witness them? That’s what we’re covering today in an episode that reaches into considerations of intergenerational trauma, and how even what’s not said gets transmitted from one generation to the next. Author Rich Benjamin shares with us the story of his family’s tumultuous past in Haiti, and its impact...

For many, spirituality is a private inner journey filled with nuance and informed by culture, family of origin, life experiences both positive and negative, and much more. Guest Alicia Jo Rabins shares her own journey at the heart of her new memoir, When We’re Born We Forget Everything— one that started with a fairly typical secular Jewish suburban upbringing and later twists and turns through the...

This week’s Memoir Nation introduces a new memoir challenge and invitation to writers to come check out what we’re calling Memoir Showers at Memoir Nation. Join our community for a whole month of writing prompts, community support, and confetti—of course. And what’s up with this new slew of celebrity pet memoirs? Do you find this week’s book trend troubling or amusing? Tune in to see what you thin...

We have a gorgeous interview this week on Memoir Nation with poet, novelist, and now memoirist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Rachel’s new memoir, The Flower Bearers, is about two incidents that happened in short succession—the death of her best friend, poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, and the stabbing of her husband, author Salman Rushdie. Her book and this interview are an exploration of the layers of grief, h...

This week Memoir Nation is tackling two areas of interest to most writers: writing residencies and book festivals. Guest Janine Kovac, in addition to being an author herself, adjudicates submissions for various residencies and is co-director of Litquake's Lit Crawl. As such, she reads hundreds of applications and submissions and has some pro tips on how authors should be thinking about their appli...

Before memoir was the craze that it is today, there were writers who were defining the genre. Marya Hornbacher was one of them. Her two best-selling memoirs, Wasted and Madness , are two of the most influential memoirs of all time—giving rise to a whole slew of books not only on her topics of eating disorders and mental health, but about many challenging topics that later became collectively (and...

This week, guest Mimi Nichter brings us a unique opportunity to talk about the courage—and many years—it sometimes takes to tell the story you must write. In Mimi’s case, it took 50 years. In 1970, Mimi was on Trans World Airlines Flight 741 when it got rerouted from Tel Aviv to to Jordan after it was hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Her memoir, Hostage: A...

This week’s episode is a meditation on partnership and all the ways there are to both attend to your partner and to fail. In his new book Choreplay , author Jordan Carlos calls himself out for some of his shortcomings as a husband, but also explores ways he can and does show up for his wife. Grant and Brooke reveal their own thoughts about how they measure up as spouses, and also consider memoirs...

Much like guest Sarah Aziza’s beautiful memoir, The Hollow Half, this week’s show covers a lot of territory and shines light on multiple topics of interest to memoirists. We explore memoir as art—what that means and whether memoirists should strive for their work to be art per se. Aziza’s book is experimental and ambitious, and as such gives this week’s episode delves into craft choices and proces...

This week’s episode touches upon so many interesting topics for memoirists—from catalyst moments that create the foundational stories of our memoirs; to the ways we can prism experience through “before” and “after”; to the journey of titling and subtitling; to the wild and unpredictable individual journeys that lead to published books. Author Karen Palmer is an insightful guest whose memoir and jo...

This week Memoir Nation has the privilege of elevating the voices of four African-born authors who were part of a panel conversation with Brooke back in December. This was part of #ReadingAfricaWeek, a global reading celebration in which individuals and organizations share African books, create booklists, hold talks or panels, and spotlight writers. You can find out more at catalystpress.org , and...

This week’s episode is sweeping, interesting, and passionate. Guest Andre Dubus III takes us on a ride through some of memoir’s more confounding territory—what’s yours to tell; considerations of harm; writing about violence; and getting to truth on the page. Also, Grant has a new book out, and we talk about his book trailer in this week’s episode. Watch here. Andre Dubus III has authored nine book...

This week’s Memoir Nation show shares a story of poverty, and shines light on a particular kind of story that’s much more prevalent than many of us would like to think. Guest Suzette Partido writes in her new book, Love Will Save Us, Right? , about how she slid into poverty, the struggles she and her family face given that everything is uncertain. And yet, this is a book about love and looking out...